Light-skinned-ed Girl

biracial cartoonist

i have a google news alert for the word "biracial" -- i get an email daily of a list of usually two or three links to newspapers that have run a story with the word that day.  today, i was excited to read about a young biracial cartoonist whose comic strip "maintaining," about a biracial high school boy, will soon be running in newspapers across the country.  we've made it to the big-time folks.  biracial folks are now also animated!  (it is a not-so-secret wish of mine that i one day become an animated character.)  the fact that there will be a comic strip dealing with the travails of a biracial character also made me think about how --finally--we, as biracial people, are presenting our own image and we are a diverse group of mulattoes!  -- we don't have to be the stereotypical tragic mulatto--we can be funny too.  i'm hoping for the best for this young cartoonist, Nate Creekmore.  i'm hoping he's funny too.

dael orlandersmith & The Gimmick

if you can find some way to see this one-woman show by actor-poet-playwright dael orlandersmith you must.  it's the story of two friends, a girl and a boy, coming-of-age in 1970s harlem.  the yearning of the young girl was so perfectly portrayed.  when a librarian takes a special interest in her and introduces her to great authors like james baldwin, i started crying and really didn't stop until the end of the show.  "use your words," miss ennis says to the girl over and over again.  just thinking about it makes me want to cry.  it's such a simple exhortation, but it changed the girl's life!  i am using my words today.  i want to be a word-magician like dael orlandersmith.  she gave me such a wonderful experience yesterday--an opportunity to connect with that childhood yearning--and a way to think about it.

"a heritage revealed"

don't miss this audio commentary from NPR's Scott Simon.

racelessness and love

i've been thinking about a recent new york times essay in the Modern Love section.  written by an african-american woman who decides not to continue a relationship with a white man, the essay is an extraordinarily honest look at what it means for this woman to be an interracial relationship.  she says it "costs too much for me to date a white man."  and in some ways, i understand what she means. in my novel manuscript, light-skinned-ed girl, an african-american character, laronne, struggles with a similar question when her adult son brings home his first serious girlfriend, a white Swedish woman.  "but what does it feel like?, laronne thinks.  to be so close to someone who can live without that--and she can't think of what to call it--what it feels like to be black, to have to think about being black while just being . . . she wonders: does her son still get to be black when he's with her?  or is he blacker than he's ever been?  being white is not having a definition attached to you.  it is an advantage--not having a set meaning to people.  is this her son's advantage now too?  the question laronne wants to ask but doesn't know how is: does it make you feel some other way?  not about love, but about yourself--if the person you love isn't a mirror looking back?"

i don't have the answer, but i think it's a question that i share with my character.

my white mother

One of my main obsessions in my writing is the relationship between and among women: for me, and maybe for many other women, I am most obsessed with the relationship between mother and daughter.  Between my mother and me as her daughter.  Between my mother and me.

My mother was my first teacher in womanhood.  Though we were outnumbered in our home by only one, a male sensibility permeated our home.  My father, a loud and often domineering presence, set the tone: loud talking, rough housing, and general mayhem that didn't agree with my own preference for quiet book reading, coloring and playing with dolls.

My mother was the first woman I knew.  She was the best.  What could I tell you about my mother?  At age seven, I might have said: She is tall.  (Really, she measures about five feet in heels.)  Not nearly as tall as Pop but tall.  She has the straightest teeth.  She has the best smile.  One time she didn't eat anything but vitamins and water for 21 days so she could be skinny.  And then she was.  It didn't make her any more beautiful.  But that's what my dad said.  At seven, I would have told you: my mom is the beautiful-est, smartest woman in the whole wide world.  I want to be just like her.  Exclamation point!  (I remember being fond of exclamation points and it seems I really meant everything I said then.  I was seven and I still believed in my voice and in me.)

Oh, and she is white.  My mother is white. 

Well, actually, no at seven, I wouldn't have said that.  I didn't know what white was.  What I knew was my mother. 

It was 1976: a year for the bicentennial, for bell bottoms and for big hair.  And my mother wanted big hair.  Her hair was naturally blonde and stick-straight, and long along her back like a long horse-tail or whip.  I followed along with her to the beauty salon the day she decided to cut off her hair despite my father's objection.  She wanted that style that Barbra Streisand had on her new album cover.  The Afro style.  She wanted to be able to pik her hair out and free.  I sat and watched as the hairdresser cut and snipped, snipped and cut, and rolled my mother's hair onto thread spool-sized rollers.  Then the hairdresser lathered my mother's hair with what must have been a magic potion with a strange, sharp chemical smelling liquid she squeezed out of something that looked like a white mustard bottle.

When my mother's hair dried, she smiled wide seeing her reflection in the mirror.  She had big curls that stood straight up.  She had a bright, blonde halo of hair on her head.  "I love it," she said.

And I do believe she said it with an exclamation point!  And I said: "I want to look like that too!"  Exclamation point!  Exclamation point!

I climbed into the chair in which my mother's transformation had taken place.  The hairdresser draped me with the plastic shawl, undid the elastic that held each of my two long braids I wore (with a middle part), and cut and snipped, and snipped and cut.  And voila.  My brown hair became a halo of curls too.  "But what about the magic potion?" I wanted to know.  Why is my hair doing this all on its own?  Why can't I be just like my mother?  Question mark.  Exclamation point!

Now the hairdresser didn't say, and I can't recall what it was that made me realize that there was something about these brown arms, and brown legs.  There was something about my brown skin that would make things different for me than for my mother.

I have brown arms, and brown legs and brown skin.  I am brown.  My mother is white.  It was something that went on the list of known things that day.  As I grew up there were more.

I don't like to talk about race because it separates me from my mother who is also a woman but not black.

I don't like to talk about culture because it separates me from my mother who is also a woman, but not American.

But I do talk about these things because if I do: I can talk to you about my amazing, wonderful mother.

muscle women

i have spent the past several months obsessively watching what i eat.  yes, i admit it: it's been obsessive.  the result has been that i shed 10 pounds i didn't realize i had gained and now i feel a renewed confidence--i'm still wearing the same clothes (although i confess i also bought some new dresses recently); i just feel more comfortable in them.  so, there has been a pay-off for all of my self-monitoring.  but there's also been a cost.  in all of these months of changing my diet, i have focused on how much less i needed to exercise--and feeling good about it.  but as i worked out this morning, i realized how much i love to exercise and weight-lift.  i realized that my body can do things --it's strong and i should honor that.  it's a lesson i keep learning again and again.  i ran a marathon a few years ago -- i had never run before and i trained on my own from a book.  when i crossed that finish line i felt so amazing.  i felt good about my body.  i wasn't trying to regulate it.  i trusted it.  it got me through faster than even i had imagined.  so, today i was thinking about how i want to not just have a slim body, i want to have a strong body.  i want to know i can kick some a**. 

Nella Larsen and her biracial thing

i have been working on a scholarly piece about nella larsen this morning and find myself enraged by the majority of descriptions about her that state: she was the daughter of a black West Indian and a Danish immigrant, who "never felt comfortable in either world."  which worlds?  the West Indian world and the Danish immigrant world?  the black and the white world?  the difficulty that Nella Larsen had as a biracial and bicultural woman who came of age in the early 1900s was that there was a distinct split between her at-home experience (a multiracial family)--where being a multiracial was the norm--and her experience in the public where she was divorced from her family by virtue of her brown skin.  nella larsen fit in her family.  the "world"/society's static definition of race and family tried to take that away.

How It Feels To Be A Mulatta Me

Where are you from?

I think most people probably have a ready answer for that question right?

I do too.  But I also know depending on the day, the tenacity of my inquisitor, or depending on my own willingness to engage in the Race discussion—my simple answer may not suffice.

Where are you from?  --I hear it often and sometimes the inquisitor means just that.

Hi. Nice to meet you.  I’m from Texas. Where are you from?

Or howdy.  Pleased you could be here.  Where are you from?

Those “where are you froms” mean where do you live?  How far did you travel?  Did you have a nice flight? Or drive?  Those “where are you froms” are meant to greet, to welcome, to measure the distance—geographically—between where we each come from.

Then there is the question: where are you from?  It comes usually with some hesitation.  It comes after I have perhaps established some familiarity with the inquisitor.  It comes often with a sheepish smile.

“So . . ." the inquisitor says as a common preface, "Where are you from?"

"Portland,” I say.

"Portland?” the inquisitor says.

"Portland, Oregon," I say (meaning Oregon not Maine)

“Oh.”  My inquisitor will say with an up intonation indicating a question mark.

I have answered the question the inquisitor has asked but I know it is not the answer he is looking for.

Where are you from?

It’s a question that I am asked almost daily. 

Where are you from?

It is a variant on its more familiar and less politically correct question: What are you?  The question asked of the ethnically ambiguous: those of us who have tan skin and light eyes.  Or thick curly hair and a bright white complexion.  Or those with an upslant to their eyes, thick lips and a deep chocolate brown to their skin.

Tiger Woods famously answered the question:--What are you--by creating his own designation:  Calibanasian (a mix of Caucasion, Black, Indian and Asian)– Tiger Woods wanted to give a nod to both his mother, a mixed Thai woman as well as his father, an African-American (lighter in complexion and no doubt like most African-Americans part of a family tree that includes white people who may or may not have claimed him—who may or may not have owned him).

Where are you from?

When I heard Tiger Woods’ answer, I remember I scoffed.  Where does that make him from?  Calibanasia?  (Even I am subject to the need to not simply label people but Place them.)  How does he answer that question?  How does he answer where he is from?

Where are you from?

It’s a question people ask of me NOT to find out where I get my mail; or the name of my birthplace.  Rather people ask the question to learn what is my race, my culture, my ethnicity, my nationality – one or all of the above.

The assumption behind the question is: if I can find out where you fit on the map—I will know your race. I will know something about you if I can place you geographically.

It’s not necessarily a bad assumption.

Race it seems is as much an experience of place as anything else.  Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem Renaissance novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, wrote in a wonderful essay titled How It Feels to Be Colored Me:

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando . . . But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

As a mixed race person with phenotypically black and white features, my identity is not just black or white – a question of being one thing at home and another out in the world.  No, my identity is constantly shifting depending on Where I am.  I live with the assumptions my appearance opens up.  People tend to place me as a this or a that because of the way I look.  My identity is in the eyes of the beholder.  Race theorist Raquel Salgado calls this “lookism”—"Lookism is the capacity to be called into existence by others’ perception about how we look, [it] is central to ‘mixed-racism’ and any theory that examines it, since how we look (‘you don’t look American’), we are told again and again, is largely what we are.”  And I would add where—geographically—we belong.

Where are you from?

As a twelve-year-old, I would ride the city bus to school each day and I remember the bus driver who would drive on my morning route.  He asked me one day—after I had been riding his bus for a couple of months—"Where are you from? Samoa?"

That stumped me. I didn’t know what Samoa was.  I was twelve and even less geographically savvy than I am now. "What is Samoa?" I asked him.

"Oh, well, it’s an island in the Pacific."

"Um, no," I said. "I’m not from Samoa."

It was unsettling to me in a way I couldn’t articulate then and still have a hard time explaining.  I wondered what was it about me that made me look like I didn’t belong in this landscape? What was it that made me look like a faraway island person?

“Mixed race sees itself in constant shift, fluid in every instant, incorporating in it s movement conflict and contradiction, and the tension those produce,” according to Salgado.

Where are you from?  The question itself suggests that race can be pinned to place.  That brownness, that exoticism belongs somewhere—seems to be an underlying assumption of people like that bus driver.

People have assumed I was black, a well-tanned white girl, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Indian (from India), Pakistani, Haitian, Creole, Guamanian, Hawaiian, Brazilian, Portuguese, Sicilian. Places where the exotic lives.  Places where in people’s minds they can locate brownness that mixes with whiteness –brown skin, light eyes, straight hair.

In an anthology of black women’s writing, Souls of My Sisters, Teresa Wiltz writes: “My features stamp me as the generic ethnic, the Universal Other.  Cab drivers adopt me as their own—no matter what their country of origin.  ‘You look black to me,’ a man I was dating told me after he’d witnessed someone mistaking me for a Latina.  Well, I look black to me, too.  But race and ethnicity are in the eye of the beholder.  Context is the key here: In Atlanta, where my family settled after we left New York, race is divided along a strict black/white divide. So back home, I am unquestionably black—albeit a high yella/redbone/moriney/paper bag tan black.  Which of course, brings with it its own special brand of drama.”

Where are you from? Brazil?

I like that guess—there have been many.

Most folks think maybe I am Puerto Rican, or Dominican with a little white twist; Haitian, could be; or like one of those women from that island that famous artist painted; no, more like Indian, you know, the Bangladeshi movie star, what’s her name?  Some think perhaps I’m just white with a really good tan because of the really good diction and all—or Sicilian maybe; Oh, some think I could never be white—uh-huh, I'm too dark to pass ‘specially with that hair with some nap to it.  She black, yeah, she black, but she don’t act like she is.  Yeah, she black; but she don’t know she is, they say.  Some think I'm Creole from way back—like those New Orleans girls.  Or where is that place where everyone is mixed?  --Someone asked me that once, and I said: “I don’t know.  But I sure would like to know.”

The White Crayon

My friend's visiting with her two-year-old son: a perfect excuse to break out the coloring books.  My friend is obsessed with arranging the crayon colors according to shade.  "I never understood the white crayon," she says.  We both giggle.  She, like me, is mixed (African-American and white) but was raised by two white parents in a blended family.

A white crayon squiggle on heavy paper appropriate for small hands with hard strokes is barely visible.  So what's the purpose of the white crayon?